Opera Identity – Glyndebourne Imago

Opera Identity – Glyndebourne Imago

The Brief

Imago is a large-scale community opera commissioned by Glyndebourne in 2012 which explores ageing in a digital world. The design brief was to create an opera identity for Imago based on the idea of the stages of a butterfly from pupae to emergence and flight. The analogy with the butterfly emergence relates to the core storyline in Imago, which involves an old woman being trapped in her ageing body, who is given a new lease of life by the Imago technology which enables her to interact with a virtual world.

The creative had to work in the digital space which formed the core channel of delivery for marketing messages, as well as print.

Our Design

Our visual identity stemmed from looking at the microscopic detail of butterfly wings, which is reminiscent of pixels. From this starting point we developed a dramatic butterfly-shaped visual container for the word ‘IMAGO’, made up of a shimmering pixel-like grid of colours. Hidden in the wing outlines we added silhouettes of the two main characters.